January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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3
Instructions, Concurrency, Inputs, and Outputs
In this chapter, we will look at how different programming languages approach how the instructions are executed. We will also work through the decision-making process for our custom programming language.
We will discuss the following aspects:
- What makes an instruction the fundamental abstraction building block of a programming language
- The difference between using operator stacks versus registers to process computation
- The distinction between the language stack versus the interpreter stack
- How interruptions to the control flow need to be taken into consideration in the design of an interpreter, both in the native language and in the interpreted language
- How the execution of native code is a different ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.